WARMIST FRAUDSTERS LOSE AGAIN
"For the clueless and cynical diehards who deny global warming, it's getting awfully cold out there," Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote Oct. 24. It is indeed. Here in Pennsylvania we had last month the earliest snowfall anyone can remember. This winter will be cold and stormy, the Farmers Almanac predicts. But that's not what Mr. Robinson meant. "Despite denials for political agendas, global warming at the hands of man is beyond doubt after a former skeptic's study," said the subhed over his column in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Mr. Robinson was referring to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, which examined temperature measurements from 1800 to 2010 from 39,000 ground stations around the world. It's instructing to see how a warmist fraudster distorts it.
NO MORE ON-THE-JOB NATIONAL SECURITY TRAINING FOR A PRESIDENT
Until recently, most politicians, pundits and others among the "smart people" insisted that Election 2012 was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. The more broad-minded contended that the related issues of the lousy economy and the imperatives of deficit reduction also might feature. But that was all that mattered, especially in the presidential contest. Then, GOP candidate Herman Cain, a successful businessman who has risen in the polls in no small measure on the strength of his claim to have actually created jobs, gave an interview in which he seemed unaware that Communist China has the bomb. Without skipping a beat, the intelligentsia denounced him as unfit to serve on the grounds that a man who was not proficient in national security and foreign policy matters could never become president. The jobs-jobs-jobs leitmotif gave way, at least for a time, to a new theme: The White House is no place for on-the-job-training about the nation's defense. How quickly they forget. What Barack Hussein Obama knew about U.S. security policy before he became president amounted to little more than the anti-colonialist sentiments of his father and the virulently anti-American agitation of Palestine Liberation Organization flak Rashid Khalidi, terrorist William Ayers, revolutionary Saul Alinsky and radical pastor Jeremiah Wright.
HALF-FULL REPORT 11/04/11
The big "news" this week are the charges of sexual misconduct against Herman Cain. As of midday Thursday, ABC, NBC and CBS had referred to them in 50 news broadcasts. This was rather more than the number of broadcasts in which ABC, NBC and CBS reported on the sexual misconduct of former Sen. John Edwards, D-NC, when he was running for president, which was zero. A House panel voted Thursday to subpoena internal White House documents on Solyndra. The AP reported Wednesday that just days before the firm collapsed, the administration contemplated bailing Solyndra out. And just a few months before the company filed for bankruptcy, Solyndra's top executives awarded themselves big bonuses. The executives were all big contributors to Democrats. MF Global filed for bankruptcy Monday. Showing the same financial acumen he did as governor of New Jersey, Democrat Jon Corzine bet $6 billion on bonds issued by the PIIGs in Europe, on the assumption the EU would bail out the bondholders at the rate of 100 cents on the dollar. Oops. Some $700 million of investors' money is missing. The SEC, CFTC and the FBI are investigating. Mr. Corzine has hired a criminal attorney. The odds he will be Barack Hussein Obama's next Treasury secretary have dropped a bit. The very left wing Nation magazine recently provided a sympathetic portrait of an OWS protester who took out $35,000 in student loans to get a masters degree in puppetry - and now wonders why he can't get a job. Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich are going to do something wonderful tomorrow nite.
TIME TO END THE FRAUD OF “HIGHER†EDUCATION
The biggest consumer ripoff in America today -- and the next economic bubble to burst -- is higher education.
Tuition and fees at colleges and universities rose 439 percent between 1982 and 2007. Median family income rose just 147 percent during that period.
Median household income has fallen 6.7 percent since June, 2009. The cost of attending the average public university rose 5.4 percent this year. Student loan debt recently passed $1 trillion. It’s now more than credit card debt. The average graduate of a four year college owes $27,000.
College students don’t get much for their money. Nearly half learn next to nothing in their first two years; a third learn almost nothing in four, according to a report authored principally by Prof. Richard Arum of New York University.
“Students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right,” said Ann Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “The fundamental problem here is not debt, but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence.”
THE WISDOM OF WILLIAM NISKANSEN
If only we had followed his recommendations, the United States and the rest of the world would not be in the present mess. On Oct. 26, the world lost one of its wisest, most competent and principled economists, William Niskanen. Bill did his undergraduate work at Harvard and earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Milton Friedman. He then taught at a couple of leading universities, was a high-level official at the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department, served as chief economist of the Ford Motor Co., was a member and, ultimately, head of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and finally, served for more than two decades as the chairman of the Cato Institute. For four decades, Bill Niskanen worked for a tax-and-spending-limitation amendment to the Constitution. In January 1995, in only 125 words, he presented his proposed constitutional amendment to the House Budget Committee, "consistent with the crisp and majestic language of most of the Constitution." Here is his amendment. After reading it, ask yourself how much better off the nation would be today if the body politic had passed what he proposed:
ARE WE HAVING FUN NOW?
"The sun does not rise in the east. That cannot happen. We can't allow it. If the sun were to rise in the east - just for the sake of argument for it is impossible - then Greece will default, the euro will collapse, the European Union will disintegrate, and all of civilization will face a doom worse than the catastrophe of Global Warming, which by the way, is real." Don't you find this awesome denial of reality by all the leaders of Europe absolutely hilarious? Yet this only scratches the surface of mirth regarding what is happening in our world now. Speaking of our world, I'm writing this 35,000 feet above it, flying to Africa on a wing and a prayer. The wing is an Airbus 380-300's, the prayer is that I'll have an internet connection in Bangui in the Central African Republic once I get there so I can post this on TTP. Where I am and where I'm headed is perhaps an apt metaphor. I'm over the Sahara now, with its sandy uninhabited wastes reminding me of Zero's desertification of America's economy and culture. I'm going into the unknown, the deepest jungle abyss of the Dark Continent, similar to the chaotic unknown future facing America. Yet this non-stop Air France flight from Paris is packed, full of folks with no sense of foreboding whatever. Nor should we, facing the future we are bound for. It's about time we began looking forward to it.
LETTING THE PHONE RING WHEN THEIR COUNTRY CALLED
If you look at President Barack Hussein Obama's job approval numbers and the "right track/wrong track" numbers, it's hard to see how he can win. But if you look at the GOP candidates running against him, it's hard to see how Mr. Obama can lose. The Seven Dwarves break down like this: There is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney; five vying to be "Not Romney;" and Rep. Ron Paul, who inhabits a universe all his own. (There are eight candidates, if you count former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. I don't, since he seems to be running in the wrong party.) The irony is we must choose from this mediocre (at best) field at a time when the Republican bench is filled with intelligent, articulate, principled conservatives who've displayed courage and initiative in office. But none of them got off the bench and answered the call.
HALF-FULL REPORT 10/28/11
There's no resisting starting this week's HFR with the funniest headline of the year: Man Beats Woman With Frozen Armadillo. Only in Texas. I also have to tell you about Steven Pinker's book that just came out: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Both Joel Wade and I are fans of Pinker, professor of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science at Harvard. (See Joel's The Blank Slate, April 2006.) Pinker takes a gargantuan amount of evidence to amass an irrefutable case that we today are living in the most peaceful era of human history - by far. Really far. But is it the freest? That's another question. Euroweenies are way less violent than they used to be, but are also way less free, having relinquished their freedom to Leviathan. This, of course, is Zero's plan for us. Nonetheless, Pinker provides cause for optimism. The trajectory of declining violence is one of centuries now. We are on the cusp of staying on it while expanding our freedom, which we have the opportunity to do little more than 12 months from today. All we have to do is carpe diem. Speaking of Euroweenies...
SPINDLETOP ON STEROIDS
It's difficult to overstate the benefits to Americans that flowed from the well Anthony Lucas drilled into a salt dome near Beaumont, Texas, in January, 1901. The first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa. in 1859; Standard Oil was incorporated in Pittsburgh in 1868. But petroleum was used mostly to make kerosene, which replaced whale oil in oil lamps. (Yes, environmentalists, it was John D. Rockefeller, not Greenpeace, who saved the whales.) Then suddenly within days, Captain Lucas' "gusher" was producing more oil than every other well in the U.S. combined. Spindletop changed petroleum from a niche market into the great engine of our economy. Buoyed by cheap food and cheap energy, the middle class grew in size and affluence. It's shrinking now, as Americans get squeezed between stagnant wages and rising prices for food and gas. But in this dark hour comes an energy development that can revive our economy, restore upward mobility to the middle class, and reduce the threat of Islamist terror. Only the Democrats stand in the way.
DO CONSERVATIVES WANT TO WIN IN 2012 OR NOT?
This is a serious question, by no means rhetorical. Conservatives may be full of sound and fury against Zero, but it signifies nothing without actual evidence, of which there is little. Tea Partyers can wave the American flag and proclaim their passion for reclaiming America, but you can't beat something with nothing. If this isn't true, then why is a Total Rino way ahead in the polls? The difference between Establishment Republicans and Conservatives is that the former care more about winning than principles, which is why they constantly compromise them. Thus their mantra of ABO - which they morph into the con that only Rino Romney can beat Zero. When conservatives - such as Ann Coulter - make the same argument, then they have ceased being conservatives and have become the very establishment Rinos they claim to despise.